Absolute Links to NBResources

You can now reference your own resources in NBResources. This allows you to store scripts (like MathJax or syntax highlighters) in NBResources and use links like src="/NBResources/..." to include them in documents or document styles (the leading slash is important).

In other words: references starting with / are now considered absolute paths starting at Notebooks’ root.

Absolute Links to Images anywhere in Notebooks

Similar to the resources above , it is now possible to reference images by using absolute paths, starting at Notebooks’ root. A path like src="/Project/Images/title.jpg" will always point to the same image, no matter where the document itself is located. Again, the leading slash makes the difference.

Notebooks’ Document Styles

The styles have been tweaked and improved to provide a few new options for Markdown documents:

Pandoc style headers
Notebooks now uses <h1 class="title">, <h2 class="author"> and <h3 class="date"> to format these headers. The classes are defined in all of Notebooks’ default styles, and you can easily adjust them in your own styles.

Table of Contents
decide where it should appear in the document simply by adding <TOC> (surrounded by empty lines) at the desired position.

Version 1.1.2

Notebooks 1.1.2 contains corrections and refinements for the info dialog, document list and fixes an issue with fullscreen view. It also adds .Rmd as an editable file type and improves the “update info” mechanism.

Version 1.1

Additions / Improvements

Quick Search for list of documents – acts like search for title in current book
-“Create Link” in a formatted document accepts anchors within current document (#name).

Accept anchors in URLs and Notebooks links

Formatted documents: “Copy Link to Current Selection” copies the link to the selected phrase; this makes it possible to link to a specific section of a document.

New setting “Extract Contexts Automatically” to improve compatibility with the iOS versions of Notebooks. This is work in progress (contexts are not yet supported in Notebooks for Mac).

Cmd-T adds time only, but no date anymore (use cmd-D Cmd-T for date/timestamp)

A document’s file type can now be changed by editing its title in list view

Notebooks now uses plugin to display PDF documents (if installed)

Markdown

Treat ‘:’ like a list item as well; this ensures that multiple lines of text for definition lists is correctly aligned

New setting: Show Markdown documents as plain text by default

Setting to select which emphasis character (_ or *) should be used for cmd-B and cmd-I

When “Convert to Combined Markdown” is selected, “New Markdown” creates a combined Markdown as well.

Fixes / Corrections

Solved issue regarding deletion of books and files

Recent Items menu is no longer empty (as experienced by some users)

When changing font, background or style of formatted documents, the changes are now reliably applied.

When dropping images into documents, uppercase filename extensions are no longer ignored

Correctly handle umlauts in internal links

Show “Copy HTML Code” for formatted preview

Correctly handle notebooks:// links in Markdown documents

Improved auto-naming of documents in case of conflicts

alt+O opens Format menu

Optimized handling of Due Tasks (should be less CPU intensive)

Text is now saved automatically 3 seconds after last key press

Version 1.0.4

This update fixes an issue related to custom sort order, which now behaves as expected even with “Show File Extensions” turned off. We also added “.taskpaper” as an editable file type and fixed a glitch in one of the background patterns.

Version 1.0.3

Additions

Custom Sort Order has been added as sorting option for books and documents. After activating it, items can be reordered by drag and drop.

Corrections

When dragging multiple images into a document, all of them are inserted at the selected position.

“Apply current Style” and “Assign new Stylesheet” work as expected again (this fixes an issue introduced in version 1.0.2)

Version 1.0.2

Fixes

Preserve details of repeating tasks when manipulating task lists.

When moving a plain Markdown documents, embedded images are correctly moved as well.

Images can now be added to formatted documents through the file selector.

Added a preference “Hide document when changing Book”; when on, the current document is closed when the user selects a different book in the tree view.

Option “Copy HTML Code” for Markdown documents.

Documents’ creation date is now taken from plist (if available). This ensures that the creation date is consistent across devices.

Performance improvements.

Fixes

Notebooks bookmarklet now accepts URLs without leading http://

When switching to another application, Notebooks immediately saves changes.

New in Beta 15

Not too much is new in Beta 15, but we corrected a few minor issues and added a few features as requested by users.

Additions

Support for TaskPaper’s @done notation (lines starting with “-” are considered todos, adding @done at the end of the line marks todo as completed).

Improvements

Reliably open internal links in Markdown documents.

Paste images from clipboard directly into Markdown documents.

Fixes

Compatibility improvements for combined Markdown documents.

Detect and correctly handle older Mac text formats.

Known Issues

In formatted documents, the options “Import Image” and “Capture Selection from Screen” are non-functional; these are automatically provided by the Mac OS, but the inserted images cannot be used by Notebooks. We are still looking for a way around this.

New in Beta 14

Additions

The Dark theme is back!

On Mavericks, Notebooks shows background patterns again.

Added support for the Notebooks Bookmarklet, which allows you to import the current page from your browser into Notebooks (find out more at http://notebooksapp.com/import); Notebooks saves the URL of imported page in its plist.

New from Pasteboard takes the contents of the clipboard and creates a new document in the currently selected book.

Formatted documents have new options: Insert Link, Remove Link, Edit Link (the last two appear when selecting and right-clicking an existing link).

Improvements

Notebooks does not show an “empty” editor window any more; in cases when no document is selected, Notebooks displays an empty document which you can immediately use for writing.

Improved performance of Markdown syntax highlighting.

There is a new option to activate (or turn off) Markdown syntax highlighting .

When opening a document from search results, cmd-G jumps to next hit.

Improved Spotlight search (speed!)

Editing a document’s first line changes its title in the list view as you type (not yet for task lists).

Rearranged and optimized menus.

New formatting buttons (in formatted documents).

When inserting an image that is already stored in Notebooks’ hierarchy, Notebooks now inserts a link to the original instead of copying the image.

When using “Insert link” with a link to an image within Notebooks’ hierarchy, Notebooks shows the photo instead of the link.

Fixes

(Hopefully) fixed the issue that cmd-C/V/X/Z/Y require the user to click on the menu before they start working.

After clicking a link that navigates away from a formatted document, editing the target document could have overwritten the original document in Notebooks. This does not happen anymore (target documents are not editable)

The window of search results now always remains on screen.

Known Issues

In formatted documents, the options “Import Image” and “Capture Selection from Screen” are non-functional; these are automatically provided by the Mac OS, but the inserted images cannot be used by Notebooks. We are still looking for a way around this.

New in Beta 12

Interface changes

New lighter look & feel

There is no “dark” theme anymore

New default fonts for tree view and document list

White background color for document list

Done and cancelled tasks appear on gray background to better differentiate them from open tasks

Additions

Search results and list of due items show path of documents

Smarter Markdown highlighting (using text styles instead of colors)

New keyboard shortcuts

ctrl-up moves up one level (in tree view and document list)

ctrl-down puts focus on selected book (tree view only)

Task lists sort done and cancelled items by date of last change (instead of alphabetically)

New in Beta 11

For this update we have changed many things under the hood. There may not be too many obvious new features, but we thoroughly reworked the editors for plain text and formatted documents to make them more like what you would expect on a Mac. Working with Notebooks/Mac should be even more fun now.

Separate Release for Mac OS 10.6

Some of the changes we made for this release are no longer compatible with Mac OS versions prior to 10.7. We know we have users who appreciate Notebooks, but have not yet been able to upgrade their hardware and are stuck with Mac OS 10.6. We definitely don’t want to leave them behind and now offer a separate download.
The most obvious disadvantage of this separate release is the lack of support for the Mac native text and web views, so there is limited highlighting, no alignment of lists, no auto correction etc.

Changes to plain text and Markdown editing (most of them are Mac OS 10.7)

“Markdown” is now an extra document type (.md) which is always stored as plain text, but presented in HTML

You can always switch between the plain text and formatted presentation of a document with cmd-return (this is valid for plain text, Markdown and also for formatted documents, which then present the HTML code)

Syntax Highlighting of HTML and Markdown (cannot be deactivated at the moment)

Lists are automatically aligned in plain text

Keyboard Shortcuts

cmd-B to insert Markdown bold

cmd-I to insert Markdown italic

cmd-K to insert MD struck through

cmd-T to insert date/time stamp

cmd-D for date stamp

cmd-F for find&replace

cmd-G to find same phrase again

cmd-return to switch between plain text and formatted views

There is no extra formatting menu for plain text anymore; you find options to set font and styles from the context menu by clicking directly on the text (right-click)

Search & Replace

More “natural” cursor movement, text selection etc

Changes to formatted documents

We now use the Cocoa WebKit, which feels Mac “native”. Documents look better, images render more cleanly, installed fonts are better supported.

Type cmd-return to switch to the document’s HTML source code (this currently is the only way to use the replace function)

Due Items

Currently, the lists of due items is presented in a separate window, similar to the search results. You open them by clicking on the book icon in the bottom left corner of the tree view (leftmost column).
The items can be opened by clicking on them, but their state cannot yet be changed from that list (this is work in progress).

Misc

A few subtle interface changes

Recent Items are now accessible from the document’s toolbar (bottom), too

Search now looks for book and document titles, too

Known Issues

Notebooks’ new default font (Source Sans Pro) does not display all international characters; so if you are writing for example in Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, please select a different default document font in Notebooks’ preferences. (Sorry we did not notice that earlier)

Converting/copying plain text to Markdown always creates a combined Markdown (.html), there is no option to create a “plain” Markdown document (.md) yet. As a workaround, you can convert a .txt document to .md by changing the file extension in Finder.

Selecting “New Markdown Document” from the document’s toolbar does nothing…

You currently cannot convert a Markdown document to a formatted document directly; as a workaround, first copy the Markdown document as plain text, and then convert the plain text to a formatted document

Names and labels are not quite coherent; the same things sometimes have different titles in different contexts.

New in Beta 10 (May 6, 2013)

Additions

Option to set font and font size for tree and list views

“Insert Timestamp” from context menu (it is just one format at the moment, more to come)

“Copy Link” from context menu

When inserting photos, Notebooks by default opens the folder that was used last time

Markdown: new setting in preferences to disable Notebooks convenience method of converting each newline to a line break. When this option is off you need to add two spaces at the end of a line to enforce a line break: This is less convenient, but it is Markdown standard.

Search

Multiple search terms are now AND combined

To search for a phrase, put it in quotes (e.g. “Notebooks for Mac”)

When entering search term, hits in current document are immediately highlighted.

Type return after entering search term to search current book or all books

Toggle the search scope between current book /whole hierarchy

Replace

Click on loupe icon in the search field to toggle between search and replace in document